by Rafik Schami
Until his death, he lived in a palace close to the Umayyad Mosque. Suitors for his daughters came and went the whole time, because marrying one of Mahaini’s daughters was like winning the lottery.
That was the case with Sahar who, like most of his daughters, couldn’t read but was very pretty. Many men wanted to marry her, but Mahaini sent all the merchants and tailors, pharmacists and teachers away. He just smiled sympathetically at Sahar’s mother when she said she was sorry about his rejection of them.
“I have already found an outstanding husband for Sahar,” he said, sounding like a man who knew his own mind. “You’ll be proud to call yourself his mother-in-law.”
Abdullah Mahaini was a well-read and humorous man. “I’m occupied all day,” he said, “keeping the peace among my nine warring wives, my forty-eight children, ten servants, and two hundred and fifty employees. Napoleon had a much easier time.”
He liked the traditional ways, but was open to innovations. He married nine wives but would not allow any of his wives or daughters to wear the veil. When a strictly observant Muslim asked for his reasons, he would repeat the words of a young Sufi scholar whom he respected highly. “God created faces for us to see and recognize. It is the heart and not the veil that makes a woman devout.”
He told his wives and daughters that the veil was not an Islamic introduction, but dated from ancient Syria a thousand years before the coming of Islam. At that time only women of noble birth were allowed to be veiled in public. It was a symbol of luxury. If a slave-girl or a peasant woman wore a veil, she was punished.
Mahaini liked a convivial life, and happily surrounded himself with clever men whom he invited to his house and with whom he went to the baths and did business. His closest friends included two Jews and three Christians.
He greatly admired the highly regarded but impoverished Sufi scholar Rami Arabi, whose sermons he followed with much interest Friday after Friday in the little Salah Mosque in the Midan quarter. He preferred them to the pompous prayers recited under the direction of the Grand Mufti of Damascus in the nearby Umayyad Mosque.
And so the thin little sheikh became the great Mahaini’s son-in-law, and later Noura’s father.
Of Noura’s paternal grandparents, her grandmother did not get on with Noura’s mother, while her grandfather adored his daughter-in-law. He was a shy man, lived a secluded life, and avoided paying visits unless they were absolutely necessary. Noura’s mother always made much of him when he did call. His wife, on the other hand, Noura’s grandmother, was an energetic old lady who often looked in to see the young couple. “I’ve only dropped by to see our clever, dear little Noura,” she would cry. “The servants can get lost! And the sooner I have a good cup of coffee the sooner I’ll be gone again.”
Noura’s mother never made coffee so quickly for anyone else.
Grandfather Mahaini came to lunch every Friday after prayers. Friday was the only day of the week he could sleep in peace, he used to say, because then he had no questions left.
As if a fairy had told the young scholar what questions were chasing around in the old merchant Mahaini’s head during the week, he would answer exactly those questions from the pulpit. Sahar, Noura’s mother, is said to have told a woman neighbour once, “My husband ought to have married my father, not me. They’d have suited each other very well.”
That was not entirely true, for the two of them, friends though they were, often argued when they were on their own. Mahaini would tell the young sheikh that he should be only months ahead of his congregation, not decades. He went so fast that no one could keep up with him, said Mahaini. That way he made things easy for his enemies, and instead of rising to be mufti of Syria he would be stuck in this dilapidated little mosque preaching to the illiterate and the hard of hearing.
“Oh, come along. Are you, for instance, illiterate?”
“What, me?” cried the rich merchant, laughing.
“The Damascenes,” said Noura’s father, “lie snoring as the train of civilization rushes past. Do what you like, a man asleep and snoring will always get a shock when you wake him,” he added, dismissing the matter with a helpless gesture.
And whenever they met the great Mahaini would blame himself afterwards for having criticized his upright and learned son-in-law so harshly. Sheikh Rami Arabi, on the other hand, often went to bed resolving to take wise Mahaini’s advice and administer bitter medicine to his flock by the spoonful rather than in buckets.
Years later, Noura remembered an incident that, in its simplicity, seemed to her to symbolize the deep friendship between her father and her grandfather Mahaini. One day her father was repairing a little box to hold Noura’s toys. Then her grandfather came to call, and as usual seemed to have many burning questions on his mind. But Noura’s father went on screwing and hammering without paying any attention to the old man, who was shifting restlessly back and forth in his chair.
When he began making sharp remarks about wasting time over children’s stuff, her father rose to his feet, disappeared into his study, and came back with a pair of scissors and two sheets of paper. “Can you fold a paper swallow that will fly?” he asked his father-in-law in a kindly tone.
“Am I a child?” growled the old man.
“I could wish for both our sakes that you were,” said Noura’s father, turning his attention back to the hinges of the box. Her mother, who was just bringing the coffee she had made for her father, stopped in the doorway, rooted to the spot. She was not a little surprised when the old man smiled, knelt down on the floor and began folding the paper.
It was Noura’s first paper swallow, and it flew slowly, sometimes getting stuck in a tree or falling head first to the ground when she launched it into the air from the first floor of the house.
Noura’s parental home was very peaceful, despite being so close to the main street. All sounds died away in the long, dark corridor down which you went, after coming in from the alleyway, to reach the inner courtyard and be in the open air again.
It was a small, shady courtyard, its paving adorned with coloured marble ornamentation that continued on the floors of the rooms surrounding it. There was a little fountain in the middle of the courtyard, and its water played in arabesques that were music to the ears of the Damascenes. There was nothing they would rather hear in the hot months of the year.
Her father sometimes sat beside the fountain for a long time, with his eyes closed. At first Noura thought he was asleep, but she was wrong. “Water is a part of Paradise, and that is why no mosque is without it. When I sit here listening to the music of the fountain I am going back to my origin in my mother’s womb. Or even farther back, to the sea, and I hear its waves breaking on the coast, like the sound of my mother’s heartbeat,” he told her once when she had been sitting close to him watching him for a long time.
A staircase led up to the first floor. The flat roof over it was surrounded by a beautiful wrought-iron balustrade. Most of the rooftop was used for drying the laundry, and fruits, vegetables, and many kinds of preserved foodstuffs were laid out here to dry in the hot sun. About a quarter of the space had been extended into a large, light attic room which Noura’s father used as the study where he wrote.
The lavatory was a tiny closet under the stairs. As in many Arab houses, there was no bathroom. You washed at the well or in the kitchen, and went to the baths in the nearby hammam every week.
Noura liked her parents’ house best in summer, for as soon as shade fell across the courtyard in the afternoon, and her mother came home from drinking midday coffee with their neighbour Badia, she would sprinkle the tiles and the plants with water, and wipe down the marble paving until it gleamed and all its bright colours shone.
“Now the carpet of coolness is spread and the evening can begin,” her mother would say every day, contentedly. It was a ritual. She put on a clean, simple house dress and turned the tap to start the fountain playing. The water sprayed up from the little holes and fell musically into the basin, w
here Noura’s mother would place a large watermelon in summer. Then she would fetch a platter of salty titbits to nibble and sit by the fountain. By the time Noura’s father came back from the mosque, the watermelon was cool and tasted refreshing. Noura’s mother’s good temper lasted until then. But as soon as her husband was home she became stiff and cold. There was an icy chill between her parents in general. Noura often saw other couples embrace, crack jokes, or even kiss each other, for instance Badia next door and her husband. And she was amazed to hear how freely women spoke at coffee parties about their most intimate moments in bed, giving each other tips and talking about the tricks they used to seduce their husbands and make sure that they too had physical pleasure. They discussed lingerie, drinks and perfumes, and revelled in descriptions of all kinds of kissing. These were the same women who sometimes scurried or shuffled along the street with scarves over their heads, eyes cast down, as if they had never felt any pleasure in their lives.
Noura’s parents never kissed. An invisible wall separated them. Noura never once saw them embrace. One day, when the door of the room was open just a crack and Noura was on the sofa, she could see her parents in the courtyard. They were sitting by the fountain drinking coffee. They couldn’t see Noura, because her room was in the dark. Both were in a good mood, and laughing a lot about some male relation who had behaved very stupidly at a wedding. Suddenly her father put out his hand to touch her mother’s bare shoulders; it was a very hot day, and her mother was wearing only a thin nightdress. When he touched her, she leapt up. “Don’t do that, you have to go to the mosque,” she said, and sat down on another chair.
As well as her parents’ cold relationship, another thing that ran like a thread through Noura’s childhood was the books.
“Books, stinking books everywhere,” her mother would often complain. The books did not stink, but they were certainly everywhere. They filled the shelves of both rooms on the ground floor, as well as the shelves in the attic, where they also lay stacked in piles or open on the floor. The only space clear of them was a chair at the desk and a sofa. Later, Noura would often sit there for hours on end, reading.
No books were allowed in her parents’ bedroom or the kitchen. That was by her mother’s wish, and her father, although he regretted it, went along with what she wanted, for after all the house belonged to her, even after their wedding. “Your father had nothing when we married but thirty lice and three thousand books stinking of mould,” said her mother to Noura, laughing. She was not exaggerating. Rami Arabi was a learned Sufi who thought little of worldly goods, and preferred the pleasures of Arabic script to all others.
Unlike his first wife, Noura’s mother Sahar could not read. She was seventeen years younger than her husband, and had been just seventeen when he married her. Rami Arabi had three sons by his first marriage. They were almost his second wife’s age, and now had families of their own. They seldom visited their father’s house, for Noura’s mother did not like them, and she disliked talking about them and their dead mother. She despised her stepsons because they were not only poor, like their father, but also stupid. Noura’s father knew that himself, and it was a grief to him that none of his sons was clever. He loved Noura, and used to tell her she had the brains he could have wished for in a son. “If you were a man you would turn people’s heads in the mosque.”
He himself lacked the fine voice and appearance that matter a great deal to Arabs. Although his sons were a disappointment to him, he always spoke well of his first wife, which was particularly annoying to Noura’s mother. Sometime she would hiss, “Graveyards are supposed to smell of incense, but this one just stinks of decomposition.”
On the other hand, Noura’s mother looked after her husband loyally and with respect. She cooked for him, washed and ironed his robes, and consoled him when he suffered one of his many setbacks. But she never for an instant loved him.
The house belonged to Noura’s mother, but he had the last word. Sahar would have liked to wear the veil, to show a clear distinction between her own sphere and the world outside it, but he hated veils, just as her own father had done. “God has graced you with a beautiful face because he wanted people to like looking at it,” one of them used to tell her before her marriage and the other after it.
When a distant aunt, fascinated by Noura’s lovely face, suggested that it might be better for her to wear a veil so as not to lead men astray, Noura’s father laughed. “If all were just and right, as God and his Prophet say, then men ought to wear veils too, for many men also lead women astray with their handsome looks, or am I wrong?”
The aunt leaped to her feet as if a snake had bitten her and left the house, because she understood what he meant. She was having an affair with a handsome young man in her neighbourhood. Everyone knew about it except her husband. Noura’s mother had been cross for two days, because she did not think her husband’s allusions were the right thing to say to a guest. She was oddly prudish anyway. When she hung out the washing she always took care that her own underclothes were on the line in the middle, where they would be shielded from prying eyes on both sides of the rooftop. She felt curiously ashamed, as if her underwear were not made of cotton but was her own skin.
Their neighbour Badia was not allowed to wear the veil either. Her husband even wanted her to receive his guests. He was a rich textiles merchant in the Souk al-Hamidiyyeh, and often had visitors – even Europeans and Chinese. Badia welcomed them, but with reserve, because she was convinced that infidels were unclean.
Unlike Badia, however, who did not particularly respect her husband, Sahar was afraid of her own husband Rami, just as she was afraid of all men, ever since her father had once thrashed her as a little girl when she unthinkingly called him “a strutting rooster with a lot of hens” in front of his guests, embarrassing him. At the time he waited patiently until the guests had left the house, and then told one of the servants to give him a cane and hold Sahar down by both hands. Then he beat her, and neither her mother’s tears nor the servant’s pleas were any use. “My husband will be the crown on my head,” she had to repeat in a clear voice. But her voice was stifled by her tears many times, and her father seemed to be hard of hearing that day.
Her own husband could also lose his temper within seconds. He never struck her, but he lashed her with his tongue and it went to her heart more sharply than a knife made of Damascene steel. Whenever his lips quivered and the colour of his face changed, she was afraid.
She longed for a son, but after Noura all her children died just before or just after they were born.
Years later, Noura remembered her mother taking her to the cemetery near Bab al-Sagheer. This old graveyard contained not only plain graves but also cupolas containing the tombs of particularly distinguished men and women of the early history of Islam, members of the Prophet’s family and his travelling companions. Her mother always sought out the grave of Umm Habiba, one of the Prophet’s wives, and the grave of his granddaughter Sakina. There were always many Shiite women standing there, wrapped in black garments, especially Iranian women on pilgrimage. They walked along the rows of shrines with ribbons and scarves, as if by merely touching a relic they could take it home with them. And although her mother was one of the Sunni majority, and hated Shiites worse than Jews and Christians, she prayed for a son there. She passed her hand over a shrine and then stroked her belly. She dared not bring a scarf, because her husband laughed at such superstition, and she was afraid that the angry dead would punish her with a deformed baby.
Indeed, as Noura remembered it, her mother spent more time in graveyards than among the living. With hundreds of other believers, she visited the tombs of famous scholars of Islam and companions of the Prophet, climbed Mount Qasioun with them and laid flowers and green branches of myrtle on the graves. Noura did not enjoy this exhausting procession, which began early in the morning and went on until the muezzin called the faithful to prayer at midday. It was held on certain days in the holy months of Rajab, Shaban, a
nd Ramadan, whether it was bitterly cold or blazing hot outside. Noura always had to go too, but her father wriggled out of it. He thought all such rituals were superstition, and despised them.
And every time the procession ended at the doors of a mosque at the foot of Mount Qasioun. Hundred if not thousands stood there and called out loud, sending their prayers and wishes up into the sky. It was all done in great haste, the visit, the laying of the flowers and green myrtle boughs, the prayers. For prophets, like angels, listened to prayers only until noon, said Noura’s mother. And sure enough, when the muezzin called them to midday prayers, they all instantly fell silent. For years it was also the custom for believers to activate the many bronze knockers and metal rings adorning the doors to that mosque, making a terrible racket, until the sheikh of the mosque, annoyed, had them removed and told the disappointed crowd, “If God and his Prophets don’t hear your cries and prayers, then they won’t listen to that raucous noise either.”
Noura’s mother loved the procession, and took part in it as if she were in a hypnotic trance. So she also knew, much better than Noura’s father, when you should visit which graves and at what time of day.
Sometimes he would sigh despairingly, “Am I the sheikh around here or are you?”
Noura’s father had forbidden her mother to visit quacks, saying she would do better to consult a proper doctor. Nor did he want to know about his wife’s attempts to petition saints dead or alive. So Noura never said anything about any of her mother’s visits to sacred graves or holy men. She was sorry for her. Things reached the point where Noura herself began begging God to send her mother a son.
